Asteroid fragments that exploded over Germany on January 21 and were found five days later have been confirmed as a rare type of space rock that could shed light on the origin of the Earth.
As Space.com first reported on February 1, scientists suspected that the strange appearance of meteorite fragments from parent asteroid 2024 BX1 indicated that they were part of a rare group called aubrites. These suspicions have now been confirmed.
SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens was part of the team that found several meteors. He told Space.com that before this, there had been only 11 examples of aubrite meteorite impacts on Earth. The incredibly rare specimens come from a family believed to represent only 1% of known meteorites.
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The aubrite meteors in 2024 BX1 differ from other meteors in that they have a translucent glass shell instead of a thick black glass shell and have the appearance of gray granite. This made them initially difficult to distinguish from standard Earth rocks.
But Jenniskens and his collaborators at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin conducted the first examination of one of these meteorite fragments with an electron beam microprobe and determined that they had the mineralogy and chemical composition typical of aubrite-type rocks.
“The interesting thing about this fall is that we have a very nice orbit, and so the shape of the orbit contains clues as to where the source region of these meteors is,” Jenniskens said. “They probably came from the inner part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That’s probably an impact where there was a lot of debris, lots of small pieces called asteroid families.”
Meteorites are the key to the world’s past and future
Main belt asteroids such as 2024 BX1 formed about 4.5 billion years ago, about the same time as the solar system planets, from material that was not consumed by the formation of planets around the infant sun.
This means that because they are not affected by geological processes, they offer scientists a glimpse into the building blocks of planets, especially the rocky worlds of Mercury, Venus, Mars and, of course, Earth in the inner solar system.
Jenniskens added that, in aubrit, these meteors have very similar properties to those on Earth, such as the proportion of water and other chemicals. This means that studying these samples offers the opportunity to investigate the type of material that participated in the formation of our planet approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
“It’s beautiful. We have new material that could be the building blocks from which the Earth was formed. That’s the appeal of this particular meteorite,” Jenniskens added.
Studying the remnants of asteroid 2024 BX1 could be important not only for understanding Earth’s past, but also for safeguarding humanity’s future.
Asteroid 2024 BX1 was first detected by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky at the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. It was later tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Observer and the European Space Agency’s Meerkat Asteroid Guard impact hazard assessment systems; both predicted that it would actually hit Earth.
The small asteroid, which is no more than 1 meter wide and may be one of the smallest space rocks detected before hitting Earth, exploded in the atmosphere over Munich, Germany, creating a bright fireball seen across Europe. .
According to Jenniskens, this explosion could help scientists better understand asteroid strikes. That’s because space rocks that explode this way on Earth are usually much larger, like the 59-foot-wide (18 meters) Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia’s southern Ural region on February 15, 2013.
“Here we have a chance to see how a small asteroid behaves when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere,” Jenniskens said. aforementioned. “We can see how it breaks apart in a very interesting way that deserves much more study. This could guide predictions of what height above Earth a larger object might break apart.”
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The SETI scientist adds that this could help us prepare for attacks from smaller asteroids by helping us predict where their debris will fall on Earth after the explosion.
These findings regarding specific aubrite meteors were submitted to the Meteorological Society’s International Nomenclature Committee on February 2, 2024, for review and approval.